Elias Khoury - Gate of the Sun

At this point Monsieur Georges got into a complicated analysis of Boss Josèph’s state of mind, saying he wasn’t aware of what he was doing and so couldn’t be considered responsible for his crime, and he got into a complex theory about death. Then he asked me if I’d killed anyone.

“Listen, Monsieur Georges, I’m a fighter, your friend is a butcher. Can’t you tell the difference between a criminal and a soldier?”

“You’re right, you’re right, but I want to know.”

“What do you want to know?”

“I’m asking you if you’ve ever killed anyone and what you felt afterward.”

In the middle of this maelstrom, he asks me if I’ve killed anyone! Where does this man live?

“Of course,” I said. I said it simply, even though I’d never asked myself that question before. I hadn’t killed anyone, in the sense of getting close to an unarmed man and firing at him and seeing him die. But I said with a simplicity that astonished Monsieur Georges that I’d killed.

He asked me about my feelings.

“What feelings? There are no feelings.”

Imagine, Abu Salem. Imagine if Monsieur Georges came to you and asked you the same question. How would you answer him? For sure you’d throw him out of your house and tell him to go to hell. What kind of questions are these? Doesn’t this genius know that death means nothing, all his talk of blood instinct means nothing, it’s just literary talk? In war, we kill like we breathe. Killing means not thinking about killing, just shooting.

Is it possible that someone would come along in the middle of the whirlwind of this war and ask me about my feelings when I kill?

First of all, I haven’t killed.

Second of all, even if I’d killed, there would have been no feelings.

And finally, I’m a fighter. Either I die or I live. What am I supposed to do?

Monsieur Georges wanted to focus on the first experience. He said he was starting to understand my response, because anything could become a habit, and habitual behavior loses its impact.

“Tell me about the first time,” he said.

“There wasn’t a first time,” I said.

“No, no, try to remember.”

“The first time I saw a man die, he was screaming that he wanted to die.”

That was my first time.

Do you remember your first time, master?

I think that this kind of question leads nowhere.

When Monsieur Georges asked me about my first time, I could only remember myself as a cadet. I could see myself running with the other boys with shaved heads and crying out: “We’ll die, we’ll die, but we will never submit!”

The trainer running in front of us shouting, “We’ll die,” and us behind him, our mouths full of the fruit of death. That was my first experience — putting death in my mouth like a piece of gum, chewing on it, running with it to the end of the world and then spitting it out. But Monsieur Georges wanted to know my feelings when I killed a man — so I asked him about his feelings. He said he’d never fought in his life. I don’t understand how a man can be an intellectual and a writer and let war go on right next to him and not try to find out what it’s like.

He said his first time was when he truly saw, and then he told me the story of the barrels in the camp Jisr al-Basha.

He told me he went with them to provide press coverage and saw how they forced their prisoners to get into the barrels. He said the fall of the Tal al-Za’atar and Jisr al-Basha camps had been barbaric.

I told him I didn’t want to hear about it — about the barrels that seeped blood, or the prisoners rolling around inside the barrels, or the rapes, the killings, or the eating of human flesh.

I have enough to deal with as it is.

I told him I hated myself now. I hated myself for the way I’d stood spellbound in front of that yellow poster designed by an Italian artist — I’ve forgotten his name — as a salute to the martyrs of Tal al-Za’atar. I hate those three thousand vertical lines the artist put on his poster. I hate our way of celebrating death. The number of our dead was our distinguishing feature — the more deaths, the more important we became.

I said I no longer liked our way of playing with death.

He said death was a symbolic number and numbers had been the sole stable element since the dawn of history. “Numbers are magic,” he said. “Nothing fascinates men more than numbers; that’s why death expressed in numbers turns into a magic formula.”

We left the café. He gave me a lift to the entrance of the camp and went away. I don’t know what he wrote in his newspaper about the meeting with Boss Josèph that never took place; I lost interest the moment I got back to the camp. Even the idea of reconciliation stopped making any sense: The reconciliation has happened without happening, as should be clear from my telling you about the incident without getting upset.

The reconciliation happened when Dunya became the victim of her own story; when her story was transformed into a scandal, the woman fell from grace and all that was left were her two eyes suspended in the emptiness of her sand-colored face.

I believe she became separated from her own story when she agreed to participate in Professor Muna’s game. I saw her on TV; I saw how she bent over the microphone after the horrible clatter of her crutches hitting the ground. And she was lying, I swear she was lying. How can you rape a girl with a shattered pelvis? She said she’d been hit in her right thigh, meaning her pelvis, and then that she fell and they threw themselves on top of her — which is impossible. But that was the story the public wanted to hear. Rape is a symbol. I’m not talking just about Arabs but about everyone on earth. Man connects war with rape. Victory signifies the victor raping the defeated enemy’s women; it’s only complete when the women are subjected to rape. This isn’t something that happens in reality, of course; it’s a fantasy. No! God forbid — Dunya didn’t say she was raped because she wanted that. I don’t accept the superficial, simplistic point of view that so many men hold about women wanting to be raped; rape is one of the most savage and painful things there is. Dunya said she was raped to please the psychologists, the sociologists, and the journalists, who were expecting to hear that word from her. She said it, and they relaxed.

That’s the problem with the Lebanese war. It entered the world’s imagination pre-packaged as insanity. When we say that its insanity was normal, the same insanity as in any war, our listeners feel thwarted and think we’re lying. Even Boss Josèph’s story — I won’t say it didn’t happen; it probably did, and there may have been worse outrages. The issue isn’t what happened but how we report and remember it.

I’m convinced that if Boss Josèph had come to the restaurant and told the story to me, he would’ve been compelled to introduce fundamental modifications. He was used to telling it in front of people who believe that what happened in the camps was heroic. With me, however, he wouldn’t have been able to talk about heroism. He would have had to describe what he did in a cold and neutral, maybe even apologetic, fashion. And that would’ve changed everything; even the significance of that bullet penetrating the heads of two children thrown down on a table in a house somewhere in the camp would have changed.

I will never forget how the clusters of flies hovered over me and pursued me. I won’t forget the buzzing blue flies over those bodies acting as reservoirs for all the death in the world. I won’t forget how we stepped over the distended vertical bodies, holding our noses.

I told Monsieur Georges that “the first time” didn’t exist, that there was a beginning only in stories.